Oil Now and in the Future

Andrew Revkin's New York Times blog, Dot Earth,has an excellent article on the implications of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The article looks at the future of oil, the spill itself, and policy changes that will need to be made.

The article will be found here.

Well worth reading.

Strategy and the Planet

Climate change, with its disruption of traditional farming and living patterns, its effects on food and water supplies, and its economic repercussions, has always posed a strategic threat to all nations. The world's dependence on fossil fuels has also been a problem in its own right, regardless of its effects on the environment. Commentators, including some in the Pentagon, agree that ignoring climate change for business as usual is not just morally wrong, but strategically foolhardy.

A group of retired military officers has now formed Operation FREE, a campaign to present the strategic importance of sustainable energy policy and work toward cleaner energy policies.

In a country where too many members of Congress still talk as if global warming were a minor problem that threatens jobs and may be a hoax, a campaign like this is a significant development. Those who don't listen to the scientific consensus may pay attention to hard-nosed, well-reasoned strategic arguments. Even if they do not, it is good for the rest of us to remember that a sustainable economy is not only the right direction, but the smart direction.

Three Modest Proposals

Buildings and transportation are the sectors of the U.S. economy that generate the most greenhouse gases. Refitting our houses, public buildings, and neighborhoods to make them sustainable will take time. It will create new industries and jobs, but it is a long-term, not a short-term solution.

Transportation is both a long-term and a short-term problem. The Cash for Clunkers program, which recently concluded, was touted partly as a way to cut fuel use, and therefore greenhouse gases. Most reports showed that it effectively cleared auto dealers' inventory but did little for fuel use or the environment.

Cash for Clunkers was a camel—a horse designed by a committee—but it is not too late for other ideas that could, if implemented, have more impact on fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions.

Herewith, three such ideas. They are simple in principle and easy to understand. They would help lower fuel use and emissions. They are not, however, camels, and because they are not, they may never make it through Congress. I present them in the order of likelihood.

• Delivering the Goods: Driving to a store and back uses fuel. Multiply this by tens of thousands of cars, and it uses a lot of fuel. If more stores offered free delivery service, more people could avoid driving to the store and back, which in turn would economize on fuel because one delivery truck on a well-planned route uses less fuel than hundreds of cars driving to the store and back. Free delivery would also allow small businesses to compete with big box stores, which generally do not deliver. To encourage delivery services, why not offer businesses below a certain size an up-front tax credit if they provide free delivery? This would be simple to do; it would be a tax cut for the sector that generates more new jobs than any other; and it would economize on fuel.
  
• Cap and Reward: Why not create a voluntary fuel-saving program for households? Households which enrolled in the program would receive a fuel card based on their annual use of fossil fuels. They would present the card each time they paid for fuel, and it would be debited according to how much fuel they used. At the end of the year a household that used less fuel than the previous year would get a tax credit for economical fuel use. There would be no penalty for going over the previous year's usage—just a strong incentive to economize. The program would be voluntary, and hence not intrusive. It would be popular—who doesn't want a tax credit? And it would almost certainly save fuel and help to cut emissions.
  
• Rides for Clunkers: The original Cash for Clunkers program was designed to move cars off dealers' lots. Rides for Clunkers would try to cut fuel usage and move people to public transit. A family which traded in a high-fuel-use car for one that was more economical would, instead of cash, receive a transit card worth, say, $3000 in free rides on public ground transit, including trains, buses, and light rail. Transit riders who commute often pay less than half of this amount in a year, so the card might provide as much as two years in free rides. Those who abandoned their cars entirely and sold them for scrap would receive $6,000 in free rides. This program would require some setup, and Congress doesn't really like public transit very much, so it has the least chance of being implemented. Still, it is worth presenting for discussion.

In the long run, cutting fuel usage and emissions will become so important that, if we don't find alternatives based on incentives and attractive voluntary programs, we will almost certainly have to resort to rationing in some form. Starting now, with programs that encourage economy without coercing it, is the best way to go in a free society. Whether Congress and state legislatures will see that is quite another matter. One can only hope.

Cash for Clunkers: Not Very Green

The City Fix has a good roundup of reporting on the environmental effects of the popular "Cash for Clunkers" program. The conclusion? That the program will have little or no effect on overall emissions.

The clearest presentation of the arguments is in a Washington Post article by Lee Schipper, founder of EMBARQ, and his colleagues.

On the evidence so far, the program is helping car dealerships a lot. The environment, not so much.

Getting There from Here—Mobility and Freedom

First in an occasional series on the ethics and practicalities of mobility.

How, in a finite world, can we get from here to there? Should we even be traveling at all? How much, and how freely?

For most of us most of the time, broad questions like these do not come up. We worry about getting to work, keeping the car fueled and running, getting to the train on time, and similar problems. Underlying all of these, however, is the question of mobility—how much we should have and how we can achieve it most efficiently.

Any discussion of mobility has three aspects:

• The Ethics of Mobility: Should we be able to move freely from place to place? If not, how are we to determine restrictions on our movements? More important, who can legitimately make that determination? (Here I am speaking about policy decisions; the ethical questions facing individuals are different from those facing policymakers.) If we have some sort of right to mobility, we face a series of decisions about the best modes of transport. Hence the second aspect of the discussion:
  
• The Efficiency of Our Transportation: How can we move individuals and large numbers of people from place to place at the lowest cost in fuel, money, stress, and emissions? Once we have a proposal to do this, we need to determine how to apply it in practice:
  
• Implementation of Transportation Plans: How can we persuade people to use the most efficient method to get to their destination?

I begin with ethics because most commentators don't discuss them. Most of our discussions concern how to make our transportation more efficient and less destructive, how to manage traffic, the state of our highways, and similar questions. To the question of whether we should be able to travel from place to place, most of us answer, "Of course," without further justification.

This is the most defensible position, but it never hurts to remind ourselves why we adopt it. The ability to move from place to place—to change cities, to change countries, to get from home to our place of work—is a fundamental component of human liberty. Countries that have restricted it, as Czarist Russia did with internal passports, are unattractive models for the future. An internal passport under the Czars was a means of social control that required a large and intrusive enforcement apparatus. Unlike a mere identity card, it could be, and was, used to restrict peoples' movements.

In order to save fuel and reduce our carbon emissions, it might be useful to restrict travel, limit the use of automobiles, or force travelers to choose certain modes of transport over others. We would do this, however, only at the cost of becoming a quite different, and far less free, society. It is no accident that totalitarian societies restrict mobility as well as speech, requiring exit visas for those who wish to go abroad and proper paperwork even for those who want to go to a different city.

Choices about mobility are also choices about what kind of society we will have. The wrong choices may change us in ways we might be unable to bear.

That, in brief, is part of the ethical case for preserving freedom of movement. Stated generally like this, it does not provide much practical guidance. The practical question is whether we can preserve mobility without destroying the planet, and if so, how. The next article in this series will take up this question, along with other ethical questions it raises.

An Argument to Nowhere

Climate skeptics set great store by the argument that science has not "definitively proved" that human actions are the cause of global warming. The chief problem with this argument is that it goes against the scientific consensus and the evidence, but there is another criticism, less-noted but equally compelling: It does not support the policies that the skeptics think it does.

Skeptics, among them Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (insofar as I can make out what she is saying), are fond of simply stating that there is doubt about the role of human activity in climate change, as if because of this we need not worry about our use of fossil fuels. The implication (never stated) is that we are free to drive to our heart's content in ever-bigger cars, build a new coal-fired electric plant each week, and clear as much rain forest as we like. Nothing of the sort, however, follows. The argument is a kind of bridge to nowhere—or more accurately, to an uninhabitable planet.

What the skeptics have done is to assume that the only reason to cut back on fossil fuels is the danger of global warming. If we can't prevent it whatever we do, then we do not have to change.

Not quite. The reasons to cut back on fossil fuels are many, and they would be persuasive even if the skeptics were right and climate change were beyond human control. Some of the arguments below apply to all countries; others apply chiefly to the West and the United States. None depend on any particular explanation of climate change.

• Fossil fuels are a major source of pollution. This summer's questions about air quality in Beijing were not about long-term climate change, but about short-term clouds of unbreathable smog and how they might affect the summer Olympics. Chinese authorities dealt with the problem by restricting automobile traffic. The smog level dropped, although Beijing's air quality probably remained poor because of China's heavy dependence on coal. It would be hard to imagine a more concrete demonstration of the role of fossil fuels in air pollution. Fewer cars on the road=less fossil fuel emissions=less smog.
  
• Fossil fuels are expensive and often dangerous to produce. Coal mining is known to be a dangerous profession with a long list of mining disasters and tragedies in every major coal producing country. Oil drilling, while not as hazardous as mining, has become more expensive as producers turn to sources like oil shale which are more difficult to extract.
  
• Even before they are burned, fossil fuels create environmental hazards. Oil, for instance, must be transported to markets, generally by ship, with the risk of accidents and spills. The best-known of these was the Exxon-Valdez oil spill. Pipelines, while generally safer than ships, also damage the environment where they are laid.
  
• For the West, and particularly the United States, dependence on fossil fuel is bad strategy. In the summer of 2008, for example, Russian troops invaded Georgia. Although Georgia had attacked first, the Russian action was universally condemned—but the West could actually do little or nothing. Military action was out of the question because of the danger that Russia might resort to nuclear weapons, and an economic boycott was impractical because Europe was heavily dependent on Russia for its fuel supplies. Some like Thomas Friedman argue that the West's use of fossil fuels helps to fund "petro-dictatorships" and, indirectly, terrorist groups. Depending on a resource that funds those who might attack you is not especially good strategy.
  
• "Energy Independence" based on increased production of oil is not possible for the U.S. or the West. The arithmetic is simple and irrefutable. The U.S. controls just over 11% of the oil reserves in North America, or less than 3% of world reserves. Europe controls about 1% of the world's oil. Independence from foreign sources, at least at current consumption levels, is a myth.

The climate skeptics are, of course, wrong. All the evidence and the consensus of the science community says that humans have helped to create global warming and can help to alleviate by changing their way of life. But climate change is not the only reason to change. As the (admittedly incomplete) list above shows, there are many others.

A Good Way to Remember

It is the seventh anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In the places where the attacks took place, in a field in central Pennsylvania, and throughout the country, Americans will remember those who died in the attacks. This is fitting and proper, even for those, like me, who disagree with the strategy and tactics of the military operations, the use of torture on suspects, and the changes in the law that followed the attacks. The dead could have been any of us, and their tragedy is ours.

But it is also important to honor the dead by our actions. To many this means supporting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the troops caught up in those conflicts. To others, including me, it means something different and more profound. It means changing our way of life to avoid (as much as possible) direct and indirect support for the use of terror as a tactic, wherever it occurs.

We in the West, not just in the United States, depend heavily on oil. Some of the money we spend on oil to fuel our cars, airplanes, and power plants eventually finds its way to terrorist groups and to countries like the Sudan, whose use of terror in Darfur has shocked the world's conscience.

The ability to move freely from place to place is an important component of human liberty and therefore of democracy. Electricity is essential to trade and communication. Our civilization would be much diminished if we did not have these things.

But it is fitting on this day, more than on most, to consider the human and environmental cost of our civilization and resolve to do everything in our power to make that cost smaller—and by so doing, give less indirect support to the use of terror against anyone. We owe this to the memory of the dead, to ourselves, and to future generations.

The Annotated G8 Statement

In contrast to 2007, when the Group of 8 failed to reach agreement on cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, the G8 Summit this year issued a statement calling for a 50% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. This sounds important, but in fact the situation is not much different from 2007. The goal for cuts is too small, the statement is not binding on member nations, and the agreement does not include emerging polluters China and India. What seemed like a start, however inadequate. turns out on a close reading to be lacking in both substance and force.

Andrew Revkin's New York Times blog, DotEarth takes an extended look at the statement, with an annotated version and a critical analysis. Well worth reading.

Climate Change Bill Likely to Reach Senate Floor

The Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act will mark the first time that a climate change bill has been debated in the Senate since 2005. Kate Sheppard of Gristmill gives a good summary of the bill, its history, and its strengths and weaknesses. It is not the strong bill that we need, but it at least acknowledges that there is a problem. Sheppard's lucid summary is well worth reading.

Postscript June 11: Threats of a filibuster by opponents of the Climate Security Act prevented the bill from reaching the Senate floor.

Toronto's Greenbelt Leads the World

Urban sprawl—the uncontrolled growth of automobile-driven suburbs—has increasingly been recognized as a form of blight. It destroys vital farmland to create tract house developments miles from work, shopping, and even good walking areas. Suburban shopping districts cling to the edges of the highway, each store with its own parking lot, or close themselves from the outside world in shopping malls surrounded by the inevitable acres of asphalt for parking. Sprawl is an offense to the eye, the aesthetic sense, and the planet.

One proposed solution to the sprawl problem is the creation of greenbelts, areas of land closed to development and protected for agriculture, parks, and wildlife. The largest and most creative of these, according to a study reported in the April 9, 2008, Globe and Mail, is the greenbelt surrounding Toronto.

"Ontario's greenbelt is positioned to be the most successful and most useful greenbelt in the world," concluded the study, compiled by the Canadian Institute for Environmental Law and Policy, a Toronto-based think tank.

Commissioned by the Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation, the study compared Toronto's greenbelt with similar efforts in Canada, England, and Europe.

According to the report, greenbelts face at least two major problems: pressure for development, and "leapfrogging" of sprawl over the greenbelt.

So far, the province of Ontario has resisted pressure from developers to open the Toronto greenbelt to sprawl.

"My goal and my mantra that drives me is that we're going to be doing nothing but expanding the greenbelt," Municipal Affairs Minister Jim Watson said in an interview [with the Globe and Mail.]

To avoid "leapfrogging," Ontario authorities hope to expand the greenbelt, in effect doing the opposite of opening the protected land to development.

The Price of Coal

Coal-fired plants are a primary source of electricity in the United States, China, and many other countries. There are proposals in the U.S., including one in Pennsylvania, to manufacture liquid fuel from coal because there is a lot of coal in the ground, and synthetic fuels would lower U.S. dependence on Middle East oil.

Coal, that is, is central to industrial society as we now know it. But it comes with costs. It is a major source of greenhouse gases, soot, and smoke. Coal mining—the traditional underground sort of mining—is one of the most dangerous professions on earth. These are among the costs of coal.

There is another price we pay for our coal: the destruction of some of our most beautiful and precious mountains and the culture of the people who live in them. The people of Appalachia have long suffered more than their share of poverty. Now they also suffer, even more than in the heyday of "strip mining" (removal of the earth above a coal seam), from environmental ruin. The method of this devastation is called mountaintop removal. It is, according to the mining companies, more efficient and safer than underground mining. What they fail to mention is what it does to the hills, the valleys, the watersheds, and the people who must live next to mountains whose tops have been blown off.

A detailed description of mountaintop removal and its effects is at ilovemountains.org. When a mining company blows off the top of a mountain to get at the coal beneath, the debris from the explosion must go somewhere—and "somewhere" usually means into the valleys below. This disrupts watersheds that have existed since long before there were humans in those valleys. It leads to flooding, destruction of property and roads, and huge economic costs in a region that is already poor. (Little or none of the proceeds from mountaintop removal find their way back to those same valleys.)

To environmental and economic costs, we can add spiritual and aesthetic ones. Mountain people may not have a great deal of money, but because of the beauty of the mountains they are seldom poor in spirit. Mountaintop removal destroys that beauty—a loss which is in some ways more painful than any economic cost.

All this because we have not found a substitute for coal to feed our appetite for power. And because we have assumed that the cost of energy is what we see in our electric bill. It is not. In the long run, the price of coal as we now extract and use it is too high to pay.

Wagering on the Future

The French mathematician Blaise Pascal suggested in his Pensees that believing in God is a better "bet" than not believing. This is Pascal's Wager, which

. . . posits that it is a better "bet" to believe that God exists than not to believe, because the expected value of believing (which Pascal assessed as infinite) is always greater than the expected value of not believing. (Wikipedia)

Those who "bet" on God, Pascal argues, lose nothing if they are wrong, but gain boundless life now and in the next world if they are right. Those who "bet" against God lose nothing if they are right, but gain nothing—and may reap eternal punishment in hell for the fact of their unbelief—if they are wrong.

As an argument for religious belief, Pascal's Wager is not persuasive. Philosophers and theologians have presented many criticisms of it since Pascal's time, but the chief difficulty with it is simple: No one commits to religious belief or unbelief because of a bet. People do not manage their spiritual lives that way.

As a rough guide to risk management, however, the Wager (which is actually an example of decision theory) can be useful. It can clarify issues, and in using it we are forced to make at least approximate predictions about the consequences of our wagers.

Consider its application to climate change. The scientific consensus is that the climate is growing warmer, and that human-generated greenhouse gases—mainly from burning fossil fuels—are a major cause of the change. Those who accept this theory argue for policies that will reduce our production of greenhouse gases. A small number of skeptics argue that any observed warming is part of a natural cycle and not subject to change by human action or inaction.

In the original Wager, readers were asked to "bet" by choosing whether to live as if God is real. Applying this reasoning to climate change, we "bet" by choosing either to live as if human actions—our actions—can make a difference or choosing to live as if our actions make little or no difference.

If our actions can make a difference, then we would want to make some changes in our way of life. For example:

• We might invest in public transit to encourage people to drive less, thereby using less oil;
• We might invest in technologies, existing and new ones, not based on fossil fuels, to generate electricity; and
  
• We might invest in technologies that use less energy (e.g., compact fluorescent light bulbs) in order to use less fuel of any kind.

These actions and others we might take have one thing in common: All of them have side benefits quite apart from their effect on climate change. If we burn less fossil fuel, we will be less dependent on oil from unstable parts of the world, and our air will be less polluted. If we improve public transit and drive less, our roads will be less full and travel will become easier even for those who must drive (e.g., ambulances, which will get to hospitals faster). If we invest in sustainable technologies, we can open up new possibilities for economic development and jobs. Thus, even if we have bet wrongly and the skeptics turn out to be right, our world will be a cleaner and better place to live.

If, on the other hand, we bet that the skeptics are right, we need not take any actions to reduce our use of fossil fuels. We might want to for strategic reasons (to protect our economy from disruptions in oil supplies) or because we think reducing pollution is a good thing in itself. But nothing in the skeptics' position compels us to change. We would probably reduce pollution and fossil fuel usage less than if we had bet against the skeptics. Thus, if the skeptics turned out to be right, we would very likely be quite a lot worse off. The planet would still be warming alarmingly, the air would be more polluted, and we would still suffer from traffic jams and oil dependency.

If it turns out that the skeptics are wrong, and we have lived as if they were right, we would face the prospect of greater and faster global warming than if we had bet against the skeptics—and the air would likely be more polluted, the roads more jammed, and our lives far more at risk.

It should be an easy bet to make.

California Cuts Back and Grows

One of the standard arguments against cutting greenhouse gas emissions—cited by opponents ranging from right-wing talk show hosts to the Bush Administration—is that making the necessary changes will damage the U.S. economy. Supporters of change often point to the economic opportunity offered by investment in green technologies and refitting our society for the future to argue that the opposite is true, that a sustainable society can also be prosperous.

Now there is evidence that the opponents of change may be wrong and the supporters right. The San Francisco Chronicle reported in an article on November 14 that since 1990, Californians had cut their per-capita greenhouse gas emissions by nearly ten percent, while their per-capita gross domestic product had continued to grow. Which is to say that Californians cut back and continued to prosper. Because California's population grew during this period, their overall emissions did not drop—but the news is encouraging nonetheless.

In the long run, our growth-based model of prosperity will become unworkable. It could not be otherwise in a world where resources are finite and the environment can no longer absorb the waste we put into it. But the California experience at least gives some hope that by moving to sustainability we will not make ourselves poor.

Notes on the G8 Failure

The recently-concluded summit of the Group of 8, which was once, but no longer is, a gathering of the world's major economic powers, was strange from nearly any perspective. Only six countries were present at the opening dinner. The Presidents of the United States and Russia got into a dispute about proposed U.S. deployment of a missile defense system in Eastern Europe. The President of the U.S. missed some sessions because of illness, but his government was always there, making agreement on some key matters very difficult.

Most disappointing—former Vice President Al Gore called it a "disgrace"—was the agreement on climate change. German Chancellor Angela Merkel's original proposal, which sought a cut of 50% in carbon emissions from G8 members, disappeared early on because of the Bush Administration's aversion to specific numbers, government regulations, and agreements that might inconvenience U.S. industry. In the end, the group's members agreed to pursue "substantial" reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, a wording that is far too vague to be effective but was the best available, given U.S. intransigence.

The Bush White House sought to portray the G8 climate agreement as a major step forward, but it is not. Even the original proposal would have been less than needed, but it would at least have placed real requirements on the G8 members. "Substantial reduction" is not 50 percent reduction; it is whatever each government wants it to be. A U.S. Administration which up until recently denied that climate change was an issue at all is unlikely to seek major reductions in carbon emissions.

Reality, however, may catch up with the Bush Administration and the Group of Eight very quickly. On the economic front, the Group of Eight omits the world's fourth largest economy, China, and even a strong G8 declaration might not influence Chinese policy. On the climate front, the evidence is mounting that major change has to happen soon, regardless of the current U.S. government's preferences. States like California, whose economy is among the largest in the world, have already recognized this and begun to take action without waiting for the Federal Government.

The politics of the G8 will, in any case, change with a change in U.S. Administrations. Whether the change will be enough to make a difference is still an open question.

Slipping on Oil

Every now and then we should pause to remember that our heavy dependence on fossil fuels isn't just choking us to death, warming the planet, and threatening the polar bear. It has caused us to make policy decisions and strategic blunders that have made the world less safe and much of the world's population less free. In the search for oil supplies, the West (not just the United States, though as the largest consumer we bear much of the responsibility) has overthrown elected governments, supported totalitarian regimes, and brought chaos to Iraq (and possibly the whole of the Middle East) in the name of building democracy. The cost to us in blood and treasure has been enormous, and for our efforts we have gained a poisoned chalice—a planet at risk and an economy subject to the whims of the oil markets.

The height of our folly was the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In 2007, nearly everyone but a few hard-core supporters recognizes that the war has become a fiasco. What few remember was that the forcible overthrow of Saddam Hussein was an essential component of the neo-conservative program long before the attacks of September 11, 2001 which made an invasion possible as (allegedly) part of the "War on Terror."

In neo-con theory, the overthrow of Saddam would accomplish a lot of good things:

• It would rid the world of a repugnant dictator;
• It would establish stable democracy in a major Middle Eastern country;
• It would neutralize Iraq's military power;
  
• It would lead to a wave of democratization throughout the Middle East;
• It would make Israel more secure; and
• It would make oil supplies more secure by giving the West another oil-rich ally—thereby also keeping oil prices under control.

Readers who are unsophisticated in neo-conservative thinking may not quite see the connection between invading Iraq and many of these benefits to the world. But whether there was a connection or not—whether the war could, even in theory, have the promised benefits—became irrelevant almost as soon as the first Coalition troops crossed the Iraq border. The actual war, as opposed to the theoretical one, overthrew Saddam Hussein—and that was all. There is no stable democracy in Iraq; the power of Saddam's military turned out to be a myth; democracy has not triumphed throughout the Middle East; Israel is not more secure; and the price of oil has gone up as demand outpaced supply and Iraqi oil failed to come into the marketplace.

Neo-con theory had fallen into a trap common to armchair strategy. It had ignored Napoleon's maxim that strategists must not "form a picture." Putting this in modern terms, it had based its theory on the best-case scenario—welcoming throngs with flowers; a government in exile returning triumphantly; democracy established quickly and peacefully—and not tried to assess what was really likely. A realistic assessment, which the government could have heard from its own State Department, its intelligence professionals, and the many non-government organizations that had worked in Iraq, would have (and did) warn against the whole enterprise.

Central to the Iraq blunder was the quest for oil. Oil was supposed to finance Iraqi reconstruction. Oil from a democratic and pro-Western Iraq was supposed to increase tight supplies and make the West less threatened by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the unpredictability of oil-rich governments like that of Venezuela. A stable and democratic Middle East was, perhaps, desirable in itself; but it was even more important because interruptions in the oil supply would be less likely.

War for oil has always been an illusion. In the early 1990s, the U.S. Defense Department used more oil annually than Sweden—and this with no major war in progress. The Iraq War almost certainly used oil faster than working Iraqi oil fields could replace it (and the Iraqi oil fields work sporadically at best). And to this day the oil has not begun flowing to the West or anywhere else.

The way to avoid oil shortages is and has always been to use less oil, which is both simpler and cheaper in blood and treasure than making war. War for oil has, like war for any reason, unintended and often ruinous consequences. Conservation by its nature is far less likely to be destructive than war. It has the added advantage that it does less harm to the environment than modern mechanized warfare. And it does not leave us in a strategic box that we fashioned by our own blunders and now cannot escape.

Requiem for the Car Industry

April 3, 2057—The death of the U.S. car industry was drawn-out and excruciating. It need not have been. As early as the year 2000, it was becoming clear that the days of the large private automobile were numbered. Difficulties with fuel supply and environmental constraints had begun to impinge upon the motoring public. Traffic jams, once a minor nuisance for those who lived in cities, had become a daily nightmare for workers and families who could not reach their work, their shopping centers, and their schools without spending hours in their cars moving more slowly than a fast walker or a horse-drawn carriage. U.S. national security had become hostage to a small number of unstable oil-supplying nations, and the might of the U.S. military, as the Iraq War (2003-2010) demonstrated, could not make oil supplies entirely safe. When the U.S. withdrew in disarray from Iraq, driven from the country by the ever-mounting insurgency and popular pressure at home, the oil supply situation reached full crisis point. There was still oil in the ground, but hostile regimes controlled much of the crude that remained.

The American car industry ignored all these danger signals until late in 2007, when its own financial crisis should have forced it to start adapting to the new situation. When Americans needed smaller, more efficient cars, the car industry lobbied against fuel economy standards and invested heavily in large, wasteful sport utility vehicles (SUVs). When state governments, fearing for the survival of their people, tried to set standards for greenhouse gas emissions, the car industry went to federal court to stop them. The states, in their turn, sued to force the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to set and enforce greenhouse emissions standards.

In April, 2007, in Massachusetts et. al. vs. Environmental Protection Agency et.al., the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA could and must regulate greenhouse gases. The end of the large, wasteful private car was in sight, though few noticed this at the time.

Attempts to save the private car were many and desperate. Biomass fuel, once thought to be the savior of the car industry, turned out to be impractical: it was not possible to grow enough plant material to fuel the world's automobile fleet without imperiling food supplies. The hybrid car, which saved fuel and had lower emissions than standard cars, provided no solution. The private car fleet was simply too big, and the effort to fuel it and build roads and parking lots for it threatened the planet even when the fleet became far more efficient than it had been in 1985.

With the widespread adoption of carbon taxes, which forced industry and consumers to pay the full cost of the emissions they generated, and congestion charges, which made central cities liveable again, consumers by the millions simply left their cars at home. They sought and demanded other means of getting around, and no longer thought of replacing their cars. This helped to save the planet, but it meant the end of the car industry as it had been through the 20th Century.

Automobile executives could have found other uses for their factories. There was much scope for innovation and profit in designing and building new and more attractive types of public transit, more efficient taxis for the central cities, and very efficient cars for the few, such as farmers, who would be isolated without transport. Instead, the U.S. car industry floundered while foreign manufacturers, particularly the Japanese companies, adapted and produced luxurious buses, trains, and trolleys that lowered both pollution and stress for commuters.

The last Ford plant closed in 2037. It is now a museum. Only a few now remember the automotive era, and most of their memories are not fond ones. They recall traffic jams, fuel costs, and pollution as they cross the streets of their cities with ease and little risk, or ride comfortably from place to place on a fast, nonpolluting trolley. They marvel that people once drove thirty or forty miles to shop or get to work. Those who did not experience the automotive era can visit it in local museums, where they can see old cars on display and hear recordings of the traffic reports that were routine when going to work involved two hours in a car instead of thirty minutes on a bus, trolley, or train.

Ethanol and Absurdity

One doesn't expect creative policy from a Bush Administration that gave us the Iraq War and the military "surge." But the President's energy proposals, made last night in the State of the Union speech, have reached a new creative low. After all the hoopla about initiatives, his actual proposals were simply recycled nostrums that he has proposed before—albeit with minor differences. Last January we were exhorted to reduce our dependence on foreign oil by switching to more economical vehicles and biofuels. This year we are supposed to reduce our gasoline consumption by twenty percent over the next ten years. We will do this by switching to more economical vehicles and biofuels. This time the government will help by making fuel economy requirements a bit more stringent. And it will itself move toward more economical vehicles and biofuels.

Proposals that made little sense last January make even less sense this year. Even on their face they are inadequate. If we merely cut our gasoline consumption by twenty percent over the next ten years, this will not make us energy-independent because there is not enough oil in U.S. territory to supply what we will still be using. Conservation at this level would barely make a dent in our dependence on foreign oil. And a twenty-percent cut in gasoline consumption will do virtually nothing about climate change. For that, the cuts must be far more stringent, and they must include all fossil fuel usage, not just gasoline usage. Mr. Bush's conservation proposal would make us feel as if we were achieving real economies without actually requiring us to do anything meaningful.

Even the ethanol numbers don't add up. The boom in ethanol is good for corn growers and possibly for the American waistline because corn refined into fuel will not be refined into fructose and added to the food supply. But even a mainstream economist like Robert J. Samuelson argues that we just cannot grow enough biological material—corn, switchgrass, wood chips (wood chips?), whatever—to feed our cars.

I emphasize wood chips above because plans to use them reveal the absurdity of plans for a mass switch to ethanol. At the moment, most wood chips used for biofuels are sawmill waste that we would generate anyway and are recycling. But if we switch to ethanol on a large scale, we may find ourselves needing additional sources of wood chips. As we have done with corn, we may be tempted to create wood to use as chips for fuel.

We can't, of course, create wood. Unlike money, wood chips grow on trees. They don't just appear magically out of nowhere. Trees, even those planted for harvest like Christmas trees, take time to grow. Big old trees, the most abundant source for wood chips, take years, sometimes hundreds of years, to grow. How far will be be prepared to go just to keep our cars running? Are we to strip our old-growth forests just so we can continue to drive everywhere? Substitute trees for food crops so we can do our banking from our cars? And how will cutting down trees to fuel our cars help to reduce global warming?

The answer to the last question is simple: It won't. Using trees to fuel our cars can only increase deforestation. That is a step toward, not away from, global warming.

This is not policymaking at all. It is, like the military surge, an attempt to distract us from the real problem, which in this case is our dependence, not on foreign oil, but on the private car. No one ever got elected by telling the people that they should take the bus or the train—or walk. But somebody must begin to do so. Obviously, Mr. Bush is not that person.

The Economics of Green

A recent report by the leading economic and strategic analysis firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers, The World in 2050, argues that, contrary to U.S. government assertions, reducing the world's carbon emissions 60% by 2050 would have little economic impact—and might have substantial economic benefits—if we did it right. The report compares several scenarios, with the emphasis on two of them, and concludes

The projections demonstrate that if countries sit back and adopt a "business as usual" approach, the result could be a more than doubling of global carbon emissions by 2050. Based on current scientific thinking, this could have potentially serious longer term implications in terms of global warming and related climate change.

On the other hand a scenario such as the "Green Growth Plus" strategy outlined in the report could allow for continued healthy growth whilst controlling carbon emissions.The Green Growth Plus strategy

incorporates possible emission reductions due to a greener fuel mix, annual energy efficiency gains over and above the historic trend, and widespread use of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies. Of the scenarios considered in the report, only this ‘Green Growth Plus’ strategy stabilises atmospheric CO2 concentrations by 2050 at what the current scientific consensus suggests would be broadly acceptable levels.

The greener fuel mix considered in the report includes nuclear power, biofuels, and alternative power sources like wind and solar. It is, according to PriceWaterhouse, a strategy for maintaining prosperity without destroying the planet.

In the long run, we will have to develop a new type of prosperity that does not depend on growth. But without change along the lines suggested by PriceWaterhouse, we will not get to the long run. Green Growth Plus is not the ultimate solution to the problem of living with limitations, but it or something like it would be a step in that direction. And it is far more sane and hopeful than business as usual—the old style of growth that is slowly killing us.

A Creative Idea from England

One proposal to control greenhouse gas emissions—individual carbon ration cards—is already part of the public discussion in England. New Statesman environmental writer Mark Lynas suggests that, as a kind of domestic cap-and-trade system, carbon cards should appeal both to the left and to the right: to the left, because they should help cut carbon emissions without hurting the poor as much as increased fuel taxes; to the right, because they could create a free market in carbon points while controlling emissions. Polly Toynbee, writing in the Guardian, suggests that carbon cards for transportation could be implemented quickly, although carbon cards for overall fuel usage (e.g., for heating and cooking) would take longer to set up.

The idea is simple and could probably be administered through the tax system:

• Each household would receive a fair share of carbon ration points, based on an overall carbon emissions goal for the country.
  
• In the early stages of the program, points would be used for transportation—fuel for cars would use up so many points per gallon, fuel for trains so many points per mile, and so on for all transportation that used fossil fuels.
• Families and individuals could use their carbon cards to track their own usage and how many points remained in their accounts.
  
• If a family needed additional carbon points, it could purchase them, either from families who did not need them, or, probably at a higher cost, from the carbon rationing authority.
• If a family did not need all its carbon points, it could either sell the excess to other families or receive a tax refund in exchange for the unused points.

Rationing has a bad name both in England and in other places, and especially in the United States. But carbon rationing on this model would be less problematic in many ways than proposals like high fuel taxes.

Fuel taxes, which are designed to increase fuel prices and discourage consumption, have two major flaws:

• Any tax which is high enough to cause drivers to cut back seriously is politically doomed. Drivers vote, and groups like English truck drivers, who effectively killed a fuel tax proposal from the Blair government a couple of years ago, organize and demonstrate against tax proposals; and
• Any tax which is high enough to cut fuel consumption is likely to hurt low-income drivers the most.

Carbon rationing avoids the second of these problems. By careful use of their share, low-income families might even make money from rationing (so could high-income families if they wished). Carbon cards would reward fuel users for efficiency, not punish them for buying the fuel they do use.

As to the politics of carbon cards, the situation would not be simple. No one likes to be told that there are limits to their ability to do what they wish. But in fact, in the future, there will be limits. The central question is not whether limits will exist, but how to implement them. Carbon cards are one idea that is worth considering.

The Greening and Non-Greening of England

A month in England puts a lot in perspective. The government's Iraq policy and the threat from British-born Islamist fanatics get most of the press in the United States, along with the future ot Tony Blair, which is very much in doubt—as is the future of his Labour Party.

For me, however, the question of Britain and climate change, which gets little coverage in the U.S., was far more interesting than the fate of Tony Blair. In the United States, climate change still appears to be controversial—not among scientists and those who understand the issue, to be sure, but among politicians in Washington. In Britain, there is no such controversy. Blair's government is publicly committed to making Britain a leader in curbing greenhouse gases, and the public seems to agree. His recent agreement with California on a carbon cap-and-trade arrangement was almost universally applauded in the United Kingdom. Even his critics thought it was a good idea, although with misgivings.

Those misgivings were well-founded. Critics like Mark Lynas of the New Statesman point out that the UK has the worst recycling rate in Europe; that the Blair government has in fact spent more on highway construction than on improving railroads and mass transit; and that greenhouse gas emissions from the British transportation sector have actually risen in the past five years.

A tourist can't really confirm any of this, but some changes are noticeable.

• There are more big box stores, and an article in the Guardian business section confirms that the Blair government is encouraging this type of development because big boxes are more "efficient." (Economically, perhaps, but not for the environment.)
• Automobile traffic is noticeably up in the English Lake District even though it is easier and less frustrating to leave the car at home and take the train (but see below). Everybody drives to the Lakes, and by the smell test, the air quality in the more popular towns is not what it was. Everywhere we went, not just in the Lakes, there seemed to be more traffic than last year.
  
• Trains are overcrowded and often do not run on time. The overcrowding is good, in a way, because it means that people are using the trains. But it is bad because it makes the trains less attractive as an alternative to the private car.
• The number of cheap package tours to holiday spots has increased dramatically. Air fares included in these packages are sometimes effectively zero, and are generally lower than similar fares in the U.S.

None of this is good for the environment in general, or greenhouse gas production in particular, and much of it is the result of government policies. Blair's commitment to controlling greenhouse gases, at the moment, seems chiefly rhetorical.

But the greening of England is not wholly an illusion. Blair's rhetoric may or may not be hollow, but outside the government there is a lot of ferment—a more-informed public discussion than in the U.S.; a number of good ideas, both old and new; and a growing interest in alternatives like green buildings and walkable shopping districts. These are encouraging. They will be the subject of future postings.